


Softening the Carrying of Coffins (or, Dead and Unburied)

by Riathel



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Based on Prime Time (Doctor Who), Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Frottage, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Whoniverse | Doctor Who Universe, canon typical angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:33:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riathel/pseuds/Riathel
Summary: ‘The Doctor and I have fought for as long as I can remember. It always had to end with one of us dead.’ [The Master] smiled. ‘I had always anticipated that it should not be me.’- Prime Time, Mike TuckerIn a graveyard, the Doctor tries to verify if Ace has died before her time, and makes an offer to an old friend. The Master accepts an invitation, under duress. They play at their eternal game, but they're getting old and it's beginning to wear very thin.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane, Seventh Doctor/The Cheetah Master, Seventh Doctor/The Master (Ainley), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	Softening the Carrying of Coffins (or, Dead and Unburied)

**Author's Note:**

> Quite a dark fic, heed the warnings.

_Extract from **Prime Time** , by **Mike Tucker** :_

_Fog curled around the Doctor’s legs in writhing, snake-like coils. He stepped forward gingerly, feet slipping on the mud-slick ground of the graveyard._

_An owl hooted in the distance and the Doctor craned his neck back, peering into the gloom. The TARDIS lurked in the mist, a black coffin shape in the shadows. Shivering, the Doctor continued forward, twigs and dead leaves crackling underfoot._

_He almost tripped over the gravestone. It suddenly loomed from the heavy clouds._

_The Doctor stopped, staring. Then he heaved the shovel from his shoulder and started to dig._

**

As a point of fact, the fog had been less snake-like than dog-persistent - billowing into the loosened dirt as the shovel struck the ground again and again. The fog pushed against the Doctor like an anxious pet; it was so overbearing that, at several points, he reminded himself that the chemical composition of hydrogen and oxygen couldn’t actually be tugging him back towards the TARDIS.

The reminders didn’t help.

He struck wood and winced, dropping the shovel. The vibrations sang through his right arm. He stood there for a moment, arms tucked into his chest, rubbing at the sharp bones in his hand with tight swirls.

Graveyards were terrible places. Especially for the walking dead.

Perhaps that was a touch melodramatic, he conceded: but he had more claim to _that_ moniker than the zombies and ghouls that populated so much of Earth fiction. He had died six times, and could only continue to do so until his regenerations were depleted. And then? Well, _and then_ , indeed. And then. A lot of possibility in that phrase. A lot of potential in being dead.

The Doctor rubbed at his hand with a brutal swipe, bent down, and picked up the shovel. The grave-dirt lifted under his careful scraping, revealing more of the pine box underneath.

He stared at the coffin for a long moment, tracing the rivulets of the wood with his eyes, processing and assessing all of it. There was no name-plate. Nothing identifying that would let him know the overwhelming question he’d come here to answer. The handle of the shovel dug into his chin as he rested on it.

He frowned.

Pine was a bit, well... cheap. He’d always thought Ace would, in her old age, be buried in something a bit grander. Oak, at least. Or maybe tastefully cremated, once he had successfully convinced her of the environmental benefits to being reduced back to carbon components. He had, surely - he knew how convincing he was about these things. Ace’s groaning and complaining about lectures would one day give way to the light of reason. She had definitely been cremated, after living out into her old age and dying surrounded with friends and family.

That meant he was currently desecrating the grave of some unfortunate. Some unfortunate who happened to have a headstone with Ace’s full name, her date of birth, and a truly gut-wrenching date of death. Too young. Far, far too young. There were so many places he wanted to show her, so many things they had still to do, she was so vibrant, so filled with a careless _joie de vivre_ that made him feel five-hundred years younger and he was—

The shovel clattered to the floor again. He’d bitten through his lip, could taste the bright spark of artron and iron start to drip from his mouth.

He was so tired. Tired of burying them young. Burying them at all was awful enough. But this was unfair. It couldn’t be her. Or they’d gotten the dates wrong. Time travel was funny like that, you could never know what state you’d find a body in. Ending up in one way when they were, by all accounts, meant to be in quite another.

The thought didn’t console him much, as the coffin and the headstone vanished. He would look at the body in the relative safety and reasonable humidity of the TARDIS.

The dirt beneath his feet was unsteady, unravelling in soft spirals of grit and decay, worms wriggling against the sudden light. Six feet down. Humanity was funny about its little traditions — first for practical purposes, and then so easily drifting into the decorative. Maybe it comforted them, the thought of being so close to the centre of the earth. A return to the softness of being enveloped. In death as in birth.

Death was the question he had come here to ask.

He stared at the shifting dirt, unthinking. Unwilling to shatter the illusion of tranquility. Graveyards. Always the same. Their stillness echoed with what humans might call sanctity — but that he felt was rather more like solemnity. A bit like hospitals. The dying to the dead, the dead to the dirt, the dirt to life, the living to sickness and then, and then, and then, and then...

It was enough to make his flesh ache for a final death. He could imagine it well enough, but what much was there really to imagine? A bit like sleeping without sleep. Dreaming without dreams. Resting. He was tired, and nobody could blame him for wanting to rest.

Could they?

He shuddered at the bleak cast of his thoughts.

Terrible. He was terrible. There was a Schrödinger's Ace aboard the TARDIS, existing simultaneously in both states of being, and here he was, giving his best impression of Hamlet without even a skull to be his trusty advisor. What he wouldn't give for a friendly Yorick. 

What he wouldn't give to be another man, with another man's problems, and another man's solutions.

The fog settled into the uneven hole he’d spent an embarrassingly long time digging and began to tug at him again.

“Alright,” he muttered, in a low invocation against the grimness of it all, a promise to the water around him, the air that filled his chest with crisp, yellow dread, “alright, alright, _al-right_.”

“How kind.” His head snapped up, towards the speaker, the fog dissipating in a shiver of movement at the edge of the gravesite.

“You’re early,” he replied, stuffing dirt-encrusted hands in his trouser pockets. Then he tilted his head, smiling jauntily. The melancholy lifted like dirt rubbed away by careless fingers. Crumbling, flaking, smearing. “And complimentary, all of a sudden.”

The Master lightly kicked a bit of dirt into the pit at him; it bloomed in a shower of dust, clinging to the Doctor’s jacket, settling in his hair. “It was very good of you,” the Master continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “to dig your own grave.”

The Doctor sighed, but his warm breath was instantly whisked away by the fog. It still clung to him, newly terrified. He couldn’t fault it without being something of a hypocrite. His twin pulses had jumped at the sudden arrival — the slight gleam of the plastic-slick TCE didn’t alleviate the thudding in his chest.

Timing, as ever, was critical. The speed of it, at least. The instigation, the meaning, the thrust of it — information that needed to be communicated before their natural hostilities asserted themselves.

“I think we should talk,” he started, and darted back at the first shrinking beam, pressing back against the dirt wall.

“I think I should kill you,” the Master replied. The moonlight caught against his sharp teeth.

Their natural hostilities seemed to have been _greatly_ escalated today.

“Then why give me the opportunity of seeing you before you shoot?” the Doctor replied tersely. The Master was already back to his syncopated dysfunction, and it had barely been two minutes. A new record. A new low, for certain. The short-term memory, the resigned bitterness of his betrayal hadn't faded into the reaches of their distant history yet — but it couldn't matter. Not now. “Let's talk.”

“Yes,” the Master said softly. His gloved hand stroked the TCE, bringing to mind at least half a dozen rather unfortunate implications. “Yes, actually, this time, I _am_ going to kill you.”

“You don’t—” the Doctor avoided the next beam by flinging himself to the opposite wall. It was convenient that he could feel when the TCE was about to fire, the prickle of hairs at the back of his neck, the sour taste of gravitons right on the middle palate. “You really don’t have to—” a third shot almost nicked his jacket, particles hissing as they compacted the dirt behind him. “Listen! I’m trying to—”

The fourth would have hit him square in the chest.

He shuddered and readjusted his jacket, six feet higher and seven feet further away than he had been previously. The Master whipped around, searching, his eyes glowing like polished citrine, a hideous noise vibrating through his throat and into the air between them.

The Doctor waved.

Then danced to the side as another shot of the TCE spat out.

“Look, I can tell you’re a bit angry,” he said, “but I would have thought you’d be over the Zzinbriizi by now and—” A sixth attack. The Master seemed moderately more irate than usual. He’d never tried so persistently to kill him before. “And you betrayed _me_ , too, we’re pretty square on that, all things considered, and—” Well, except for his persistence that time in Logopolis. And all those times on Earth. A good portion of their previous encounters, actually, well over two-thirds. “And I’ve got a proposition!”

“Nothing you could say could possibly interest me,” said the Master in one, long hiss. He was practically spitting. Wouldn't that be a sight?

“Not even how I got out of the pit?” The Doctor paused, waiting for the next bolt.

Instead, those bright yellow eyes narrowed.

“Psychic simulacrum," the Master said, after a moment, in half a sneer. "You were never in the grave to begin with. Smoke and mirrors trickery, your usual vulgar clown act."

"No, actually!” And wasn't that funny, the hesitation on his face, the voracious gleam of curiosity that arrested him — the Doctor knew his old classmate better than either would admit to in the light of day. But it was a dark night, with a heavy fog. The best kind of time for saying things you might regret come the unkind brightness of the morning.

The Doctor beamed at him. To do otherwise would be to let the smear of melancholy settle. This was hardly the appropriate time, place, or version of this person to be unguarded.

Cheap tricks had always been a source of amusement for them both, and this trick was very superficially impressive. He’d been waiting for Ace to ask him what he had meant by ‘flew’ ever since the events of last week, but she’d been distracted by her prophesied death and that grim business with the Fleshmakers.

Damn his hearts, he thought, smiling. Damn the sharp sliver of it for still hurting. Damn the Master for having been so predictable that the Doctor had been nearly unable to predict it until those last, terror-fuelled moments of inspired paranoia.

And damn him for coming here in the first place, accepting an invitation for one of those limited times of capitulation in his life, and condemning the Doctor to a fresh round of hope.

Damn it all. Not the time. Not the place. He could only live with that stupid hope that the Master would be a bit more accommodating.

 _As if_ , he thought.

 _Please_ , he thought.

“Hear me out first?” he suggested, half his body tucked behind a gravestone and prepared to duck even further down.

“Tell me in the next five seconds, and I’ll kill you quickly,” the Master countered. He spread his unoccupied hand wide in the broad gesture of a benevolent god.

“Portkey,” the Doctor said brightly. At the blank look, he faltered. “From _Harry Potter_? No? _Goblet of Fire_? Portkey in a graveyard? I borrowed the design and the general concept; quick matter transrelocation! Check the gravesite, if you don't believe me, go on, there’s a —” The word _boot_ died on his lips as another pulse of energy screamed towards him; he flung himself to one side, and his previous cover shrank to a twelfth of its size.

You could be aware of the futility of something all you liked, but actually putting it into practice was a bit like trying to perfectly remake a reflection from a cracked mirror. The end result came out warped, and ugly, and wrong, if not in significant ways then in subtle ones.

For instance: the Doctor knew — had, in fact, screamed at several people about — the futility of running away from a cheetah.

But when the cheetah said, “ _Run,_ Doctor,” had a deadly matter condensation device in its hand, and a terrifyingly intent rictus stitched across its face, well.

It was a bit ridiculous to expect him to refuse the invitation.

He ran.

**Author's Note:**

> One or two more chapters to come, the next chapter will give the fic its explicit rating and will, somehow, be even darker! Follow me at [tumblr](https://riathel.tumblr.com) where you can ask me why I care so intensely about Doctor Who EU (and turning it into horrific darkfic) and I can grin and tell you I don't know why; [Marge voice] I just think it's _neat._


End file.
